[Case Study: Update] How to Launch Private Label Products on Amazon

It has been more than 1 month since we finished the How to Launch PL Products on Amazon. When I finished the case study the product had 9 reviews, was ranking on the first page for most of it’s keywords ( but not on rank #1 ), and I was about to increase the price to make a nice little profit!

People have been asking me about the product a couple times, and if the product is still ranking on page #1 or if the rankings have declined. So I figured it is time to write a small update on the case study product!

For those who did not get a chance to read the case study:

Part 1: We discussed the product for the case study, the FBA launch strategy that we will use, we have lowered the price & setup our email follow up campaign.

Part 2: Here we started with our Amazon Product Giveaways & also enrolled for the Amazon Early Reviewer Program.

Part 3: Is where we started seeing the first results! This is also where I started with the PPC campaign.

How is the product is doing now?

Reviews

The product’s review count has increased all the way up to 28 reviews! Most of them are very positive and we have an average review rating of 4.4 stars

I am also 100% sure that most of these reviews come from the follow up campaign I have setup for this product. I get a lot of feedback from customers who reply to these automated emails. Some of the just reply with a short: “Done, left a review”. However, other customers send me complete stories about how they use the product. This is great info for me that I can use to improve or adjust the product in the future.

Ranking

Ranking wise not much has changed. The product is still ranking on page #1 for most of it’s keywords. However, there is still a lot of position to be gained as I am not ranking in the top 3 for a lot of keywords. I hope to see the product rise a bit more when it has some more reviews.

Profit

Now time for the real juicy info! How much profit did I actually make from this product?

In total I have sold $15,565 worth of this product. This resulted in a total profit of $2,275. As you can see in the graph I actually made a loss in the beginning as I was doing a giveaway and selling the products for barely any profit. Then once I started ranking, I was able to increase the price and turn a profit.

Right now I am still selling the product for a low price of $18, while most competitors are selling for $20. I am happy to take a lower profit margin right now so I can still increase my sales velocity & review count. Once I improve my rankings even more I will increase my price to $20 as well, and turn this into a nice little cash cow.

I consider this very decent product launch. I achieved everything I wanted with this launch and everything went pretty much as expected. The only mistake I made was that I ran out of stock about a month ago. This has definitely cost me some lost sales and decreased my sales velocity.

What to do now?

Some people think that once your product ranks on page #1, you don’t have to do any more work and just watch the passive income flow in. This might be true if you are happy with your current rankings & sales. But I want to improve this product even more! I want to rank this product not only on page #1, but I want to get it in the top 3 results for all the keywords.

New photo’s

Now that I know that this product is a success I have decided to invest in some better product photo’s. When I launched I just had the standard product photo’s on a white background. Which works well enough for most sellers. However, like I said I don’t want to be like most sellers, I want to be the #1 seller for this product. So I have ordered my photographer to do a lifestyle shoot with a model & make some infographics about the product. Since none of my competitors have lifestyle photo’s or an infographic, I hope this will make my product stand out even more.

PPC

For me PPC is an ongoing process that I always will be working on. On 1 specific day in the week I will monitor all my PPC campaigns and adjust where necessary. PPC is a very complicated subject, and I won’t go into detail in this post. But if you want to learn more about PPC you should check out my PPC tutorial.

New variations

Since I have now validated that his is a good market that I can enter, I am currently in the process of creating 2 separate variations of this product. Luckily I can manufacture these variations with the same supplier as this product. So with my next re-order I will be launching these 2 new products in this exact same market. Of course I hope to copy this success and increase my market share this way.

hi, good to see you making progress. i had one question on jump send follow up emails. 90% of the emails that we send through Jumpsend tend to get returned saying that the customer has opted out of unsolicited emails from sellers and as such we have not been able to get any reviews despite the product selling 1-2 units every day and we are on first or second page with just 5-6 reviews from friends and family. how do you deal with that? also, the early review program of amazon is only for sellers with brand as i understand and brand registration is quite expensive as opposed to simple TM mark. is there any alternative for that?

Did you actually check if your number are correct? Everybody is allowed to opt-out from newsletter, so also from Amazon.com. However, last time I checked only 20% of the emails I send bounced because people opted-out.

A TM is all you need to also brand register with Amazon, so no extra charges except the TM cost.

Thank you for sharing your journey and knowledge with us…Could you please tell me, do most sellers just break even on their actual profits? You discuss breaking even or taking a loss in order to create campaigns that will help increase sales (in the long run), but during this time, one needs to calculate what effect this is having(in the long run), as we still have to re-purchase inventory to be able to keep going…If we can’t count on our orders being sold, or at a just break even position, doesn’t that allow us only to reorder the same amount every time?

I don’t know about other seller but in this particular case I made $2200 profit. So let’s say I am extremely short on cash I would still be able to order the same amount of units as last time + $2200 worth.

Yeah it will definitely look strange. Amazon is a tech giant and it’s easy for them to notice you are manipulating reviews by lettings your friends buy the product. Even if all sales are from the US it’s very easy for them to notice you made 10 sales, and got 10 reviews. Which is very unnatural as nobody has a 100% review rate. So yeah I’d stay away from that kinda stuff.

I have heard that you can’t just give 99% discount coupons to get ranked to page 1 anymore. The Amazon A9 algorithm don’t take them into account. You need to have full price sales to get ranked. I have seen many people talking about it on YT. But they might be wrong…

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About me

Hi, I am 27 years old. I have been doing Amazon FBA for about 3 years, of which 2 years full-time. In these years I made a lot of mistakes. I will share what I learned on this blog so you won't have to make the same mistakes ;)